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Center for the Study of Race and Law Conference Explores Current Issues

UVA Law Dean Risa Goluboff; Claudrena Harold, associate professor at the University of Virginia; Phil Lee, associate professor at the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University of the District of Columbia; and UVA Law Professor Alex Johnson Jr. discuss race during the opening panel discussion.

After the 2008 landslide election of Barack Obama, many declared that racial barriers in the United States had finally fallen. Yet today the future of race relations feels uncertain for many, with the country facing a seeming rise of racially motivated violence and hate speech.

“Racial Justice Reform After Obama: Reconsidering Goals and Means,” a conference held last week at the University of Virginia School of Law, sought to put into context the conundrum of both racial progress and a deepening racial divide.

The two-day conference, hosted by the Center for the Study of Race and Law, brought together interdisciplinary scholars from over 15 academic institutions to address the complexities of racial injustice in the 21st century and goals moving forward in the quest for equality.

“We wanted to explore a big, wide-open question: What is the most important problem or goal for racial justice reform in America today?” said conference co-organizer Kim Forde-Mazrui, director of the center and the Mortimer M. Caplin Professor of Law at UVA.

Forde-Mazrui co-organized the conference with Richard Banks of Stanford Law School and Guy Charles of Duke Law School. They aimed to bring together scholars from interdisciplinary fields, including from social science and humanities departments in addition to law.

“We had an enriching, respectfully debative discussion that both diagnosed existing challenges and proposed reforms going forward,” he said.

UVA Law Dean Risa Goluboff kicked off the conference with her presentation, “A Broader Understanding of Jim Crow and the Possibilities of Racial Justice.”

“You have to understand the past in order to understand the present and figure out where you’re going in the future, and I think that’s very true when we’re thinking about racial justice and how we define it,” said Goluboff, whose areas of expertise includes civil rights, equal protection, race and constitutional history.

UVA Law Professor Alex Johnson Jr., James C. Slaughter Distinguished Professor of Law, said the past plays a major role in how people view race relations. He analyzed historical patterns in his presentation, “Taking a Long View: The Cyclical Nature of Race Relations in the United States.”

Johnson said today’s racial and political climate can be compared to Newton’s Third Law: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. He said the reactions may not be exact, given the nature of history and politics, but after empowerment there has always been pushback, beginning with Brown and continuing through the rise of the Tea Party Movement.

“The election and subsequent re-election of Barack Obama, an African-American, was the primary cause for the force of the rise of the Tea Party Movement,” Johnson said, citing thoughts from his 2015 article, “What the Tea Party Movement Means for Contemporary Race Relations: A Historical and Contextual Analysis.” Looking towards the future, Johnson said the cycle will eventually bring positive change for racial reform. The current negative standings of race relations in the United States will ultimately advance racial progress, he said.